The Committee finds that the benefits of extending British
involvement in Coalition airstrikes in Syria are more than outweighed by
the risks of legal ambiguity, political chaos on the ground in Syria,
military irrelevance, and diplomatic costs.The Committee is not persuaded by the Government’s efforts to treat
ISIL and the Syrian civil war as separate issues, and considers that the
focus on the extension of airstrikes against ISIL in Syria is a
distraction from the much bigger and more important task of finding a
resolution to conflict in Syria, which is itself a main cause of ISIL’s
rise.

Chair's comments

The Chairman of the Committee, Crispin Blunt MP, said:

"We are concerned that the Government is focusing on extending
airstrikes to Syria, responding to the powerful sense that something
must be done to tackle ISIL in Syria, without any expectation that its
action will be militarily decisive, and without a coherent and long-term
plan for defeating ISIL and ending the civil war. There is now a miscellany of uncoordinated military engagements by an
alarming range of international actors in Iraq and Syria, all of whom
share an interest in defeating ISIL and who between them possess an
overwhelming capability to do so. These forces desperately need
coordinating into a coherent strategy and that is where our efforts
should be focused. Making the military picture yet more complex is a
distraction from the key task to help end the suffering and reverse the
spread of this dangerous, barbaric and regressive ideology. Just as we need a coordinated military strategy to defeat ISIL, we
urgently need a complementary political strategy to end the civil war in
Syria. By becoming a full combatant in the US led campaign at this
stage, the UK risks needlessly compromising its independent diplomatic
ability to support an international political solution to the crisis.
Right now, the Government should be focusing all its energies
supporting the efforts at international diplomacy in Vienna. In this report, we set out seven points on which the Government
should provide further explanation before asking the Commons to approve a
motion authorising military action. Success in Vienna would produce an
international strategy. There would still be military questions to
answer. Until all these points are satisfied, the Government should not
try to obtain Parliamentary approval to extend British military action
to Syria."